1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink jet recording method and apparatus and recorded matter therefor, for recording an image onto a recording medium such as cloth made of materials such as cotton and silk, and others by scanning a recording head relative to the recording medium.
2. Related Background Art
Typical of the conventional textile printing apparatus for recording onto the cloths as a recording medium is a screen textile printing apparatus for directly printing onto the cloths using a silk screen plate. In making the textile printing using such a screen textile printing apparatus, first, for an original image to be printed, a silk screen plate is prepared for each color used in that original image, and attached to the screen textile printing apparatus, and the ink is directly transferred through the meshes of the silk screen plate onto the cloths.
The above-described screen textile printing apparatus has a problem associated therewith that a great number of processes and days are required to prepare silk screen plates, and the operations such as the proportion of color inks, and the alignment of silk screen plates for each color, are necessary. Moreover, the apparatus ha an additional problem that the mechanism becomes larger in proportion to the number of colors used, requiring a large installation space, and storage space for the silk screen plates is necessary.
On the other hand, ink jet recording has a quite higher resolution than the conventional screen textile printing, allowing for the printing of high quality designs with gradations. And it has a feature that considerably high productivity can be expected by using a multi-nozzle head having several hundreds to thousands of nozzles.
However, because of its nature of recording with the ink discharged through minute ink jet nozzles, the use of low viscous (thin) ink is requisite. Accordingly, dark designs cannot be recorded. If a large amount of ink is jetted, the design becomes darker, but the ink may blot on cloths, so that excellent designs cannot be created.
Also, due to a great number of nozzles used in parallel, it is difficult to form images without defects, because unevenness, deviation, and white streaks produced by capricious non-discharge may be contained in recording, depending on the characteristic peculiar to its nozzle. This is a serious problem for industrial machines which produce several tens to hundreds of meters of printing at a time in the continuous operation.
Also, light color is represented by applying ink droplets sparsely, which often leads to the roughness of an image. In particular, if the diameter of a nozzle, or ink droplet, is tired to be made larger to avoid the above drawback, it is meant that the resolution is reduced, resulting in more evident roughness.
Some treatment agents are effectively applied immediately before recording, because they are unstable on the cloths, but such agents cannot be used in the convention process.
On the other hand, an ink jet recording apparatus is one for performing the dot recording by discharging ink droplets from recording head nozzles to a recording medium, and is effective in the respects of apparatus constituting and running costs. One example of such recording apparatus is one in which the recording or printing is performed by sequentially scanning a recording head having a row of nozzles arranged in a predetermined width (about 16 mm) longitudinally and transversely relative to the recording medium.
However, there is some dispersion in the amount or direction of ink to be discharged from each nozzle of the ink jet recording head, so that this dispersion may produce streaks apparently. For this reason, there was a problem that periodic streaks or blurs arose on recorded image in a width of a recording head to degrade the image quality. Also, there was a problem that those blurs might vary with time over a long period of recording.
Moreover, there was a problem that if contaminants such as dirt or inks adhere to the nozzle surface of a recording head to prevent normal ink discharge through nozzles (hereinafter referred to as undischarged), line defects may appear on the image, thereby degrading the image quality.
To solve those problems, it is conceived that a predetermined pattern is printed and confirmed visually or with a reader to correct for unevenness with the head based on the information obtained.
However, if the execution of correction operation is entrusted to the judgement of the operator, the correction operation may sometimes give rise to inappropriate effect. Further, in this case, no measure is taken against the undischarged.
Further, it is necessary that the phenomenon of causing such degradation of image quality is checked at all times, and the correction is appropriately made, but when a long roll of recording sheet is used, the printing may be performed on a very long recording sheet (e.g., 100 m or greater) at a time, so that undischarge unevenness during the printing gives rise to a great problem, and the correction is a very difficult task. Also, there is a further problem that when the long roll of recording sheet is made of a woven fabric, fine fluffy fibers stick around the nozzles of a recording head, so that the probability of causing undischarge is significantly higher than if the recording sheet is paper or the like.
In addition, when the recording medium was cloths made of materials such as cotton and silk, and others, there was a serious problem that even if a predetermined pattern was recorded on the recording medium, and confirmed visually or with a reader to correct for unevenness with the head based on the information obtained, the bleeding of ink might occur, and due to non-uniformity on the surface of a recording medium produced by texture of fibers, the predetermined pattern recorded could not be read correctly, so that the correct grasping of the discharge condition with the recording head was difficult.
Conventionally, an ink jet printer with a plurality of multi-nozzle heads for recording the image onto a recording medium with those ink jet heads is well known. In such a printer, in order to make alignment (registration) or recording position with a plurality of heads, an image in a predetermined pattern such as checkered is printed on a recording sheet using the plurality of ink jet heads, its printed result is watched visually, or read using reader means such as a scanner, whereby the deviation of a recorded pattern is calculated to determine the deviation of each ink jet head. Based on the deviation thus obtained, the adjustment of recording position is performed in accordance with a mounting position of the ink jet head by changing the read timing from each memory for storage of image data to be recorded by each ink jet head.
However, the conventional registration method as above described was an adjustment method when a plurality of ink jet heads were arranged transversely to the scanning direction of a carriage, but when a plurality of recording heads were arranged vertically, or orthogonally to the scanning direction of the carriage, the positional deviation was only mechanically adjusted.